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Ryan Lochte Is a Human Jägerbomb
For nearly three hours’ worth of his reality show, What Would Ryan Lochte Do?, I watched Ryan Lochte shout and spasm and sigh and, most frequently, look historically, paralyzingly confused. I have seen him in his natural habitat: sweaty-faced, glowing under trashy-bar neons, teetering drunkenly in front of enamored-and-then-usually-very-bored girls who are holding tiny purses and pretending to smile.
This is because Ryan Lochte is just barely a person. He is a walking treatise on bro culture: driven only by his basest impulses, no restraint, going hard, going big, getting your back, shredded abs, hot dog/penis jokes, iPhone pictures of friends mid-vomit. He is a debauched, self-impressed, permanently aloof human Labrador who thinks every night at some club named BREATHE or THE AREA or something named after an AXE body spray fragrance is worth mythologizing. Ryan Lochte is a Jagerbomb: juvenile, completely devoid of subtlety, responsible for tremendously regrettable female decisions.
Ryan Lochte is a fucking joke. A fodder for late night comedy and he deserves all the mockery. He represents everything is wrong about young white men; entitled, spoiled, misogynistic, hedonistic, and dumb as a doorknob.
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All this is to say that the promises execs make on acquisitions are meaningless. They own the thing, they will do what they want to with it. It doesn’t matter how many nice sounds Mayer makes on the deal. At the core she cares not one bit what the users of Tumblr think. She’s saying what she needs to say to make the deal happen. To avoid a PR crisis on Day One. To make the team at Tumblr feel like their work has value to the new owners. That somehow this acquisition isn’t actually an acquisition.
—My one talk with Marissa Mayer (via azspot)
This deal is looking a lot worse than I thought. I’m almost to point of deleting my Tumblr account. Tumblr freedom is over and will go the way of the defunct MySpace.
(via azspot)
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The Great American Descent into Plutocracy
Billionaires with an axe to grind, now is your time. Not since the days before a bumbling crew of would-be break-in artists set into motion the fabled Watergate scandal, leading to the first far-reaching restrictions on money in American politics, have you been so free to meddle. There is no limit to the amount of money you can give to elect your friends and allies to political office, to defeat those with whom you disagree, to shape or stunt or kill policy, and above all to influence the tone and content of political discussion in this country.
Today, politics is a rich man’s game. Look no further than the 2012 elections and that season’s biggest donor, 79-year-old casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He and his wife, Miriam, shocked the political class by first giving $16.5 million in an effort to make Newt Gingrich the Republican presidential nominee. Once Gingrich exited the race, the Adelsons invested more than $30 million in electing Mitt Romney. They donated millions more to support GOP candidates running for the House and Senate, to block a pro-union measure in Michigan, and to bankroll the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative stalwarts (which waged their own campaigns mostly to help Republican candidates for Congress). All told, the Adelsons donated $94 million during the 2012 cycle — nearly four times the previous record set by liberal financier George Soros. And that’s only the money we know about. When you add in so-called dark money, one estimate puts their total giving at closer to $150 million.
It was not one of Adelson’s better bets. Romney went down in flames; the Republicans failed to retake the Senate and conceded seats in the House; and the majority of candidates backed by Adelson-funded groups lost, too. But Adelson, who oozes chutzpah as only a gambling tycoon worth $26.5 billion could, is undeterred. Politics, he told the Wall Street Journal in his first post-election interview, is like poker: “I don’t cry when I lose. There’s always a new hand coming up.” He said he could double his 2012 giving in future elections. “I’ll spend that much and more,” he said. “Let’s cut any ambiguity.”
But simply tallying Adelson’s wins and losses — or the Koch brothers’, or George Soros’s, or any other mega-donors’ — misses the bigger point. What matters is that these wealthy funders were able to give so much money in the first place.
(Source: azspot)
